Almost five years ago I posted an article on this topic. My comment at the time:
…with the completion of the “security fence” Israel will effectively have annexed a good part of the West Bank and Gaza and will maintain de facto control of the rest for years to come. The Palestinian struggle will then shift from a struggle for national rights to a struggle for equal rights, as in South Africa.
Well it seems that shift might be happening.
Actually over the course of the past five years, many Palestinian activists have urged such a shift. But recently, on the pages of Ha’Aretz, Sari Nusseibeh, essentially gave Israelis an ultimatum: if by the end of 2008 a two-state settlement is not reached, it will be too late. The only alternative left for the Palestinians will be to shift to a struggle for equal rights within the State of Israel. This is particularly notable, since Sari Nusseibeh is identified with a two-state peace plan he authored (five years ago) along with Israeli general Ami Ayalon (who is a minister in the current government).
Uri Avenry, whose writings have appeared many times on this blog, is quite disturbed by Nusseibeh;s stand. As he sees it:
The “One-State Solution” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. The One-State idea is not a solution, but an anti-solution. It is a recipe for an ongoing bloody conflict. Not a dream, but a nightmare.
There is no chance at all that the Jewish public will agree, in this generation or the next, to live as a minority in a state dominated by an Arab majority. 99.99% of the Jewish population will fight against this tooth and nail. The demography will not stop haunting them, but on the contrary, it will push them to do things which are unthinkable today. Ethnic cleansing will become a practical agenda. Even moderate Israelis will be driven into the arms of the fascist right-wing. All means of oppression will become acceptable when the Jewish majority adopts the aim of causing the Arabs to leave the country before they have a chance of becoming the majority.
I have written my own views on the topic here. However, I would say that my position is a highly idealistic one. As I note, Shavit reacts to the idea exactly as Avnery says most Israelis will. And I agree that Shavit is highly representative of how most Israelis think. So while in principle I think the one state solution is the only real alternative, I also mostly agree with Avnery’s position.
Avnery is in fact a maximalist when it comes to national self-determination. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this analysis of the skirmishes between the US and Russia regarding self-determination. Again I agree with almost everything Avnery says. You can’t force people to live together who don’t want to.
In fact, the same principle applies in the United States. I have often stated that the US Civil War was a huge mistake. The “moral” argument for that war is quite tenuous. It is debatable how much better off the slaves were after their “liberation.” It is likely the Southerners would have freed them anyway for economic reasons (as had happened in the North) and perhaps the subsequent mistreatment would not have been as bad. Part of the reason for the extreme mistreatment of blacks in the South after the Civil War, was Southerners resentment over “Reconstruction.” The politics of resentment is now embedded in US culture. Rednecks resent Northern “intellectual elites” and us Northerners (myself included) look down our noses on redneck “hillbilly” culture. The visceral reactions to Sarah Palin on both sides of the political spectrum highlights exactly this: the cultural divide between different parts of the US is so great, it really should not be one country. Particularly in the context of the US’ winner take all political system, when one side is in power the other side feels completely disenfranchised.
And yet, I have always argued against ethnicity or cultural grouping as a criterion for statehood. After all, what does garbage collection have to do with being Jewish/Palestinian/Redneck/Notherner/<your group here>. Actually, Avnery points the way out from this seeming contradiction, and i quote him extensively:
There was a time when this principle could not be implemented. A state of a few hundred thousand people was not viable economically, and could not defend itself militarily.
That was the era of the “nation state”, when a strong people imposed itself, its culture and its language, on weaker peoples, in order to create a state big enough to safeguard security, order and a proper standard of living. France imposed itself on Bretons and Corsicans, Spain on Catalans and Basques, England on Welsh, Scots and Irish, and so forth.
That reality has been superseded. Most of the functions of the “nation state” have moved to super-national structures: large federations like the USA, large partnerships like the EU. In those there is room for small countries like Luxemburg beside larger ones like Germany. If Belgium falls apart and a Flemish state comes into being beside a Walloon state, both will be received into the EU, and nobody will be hurt. Yugoslavia has disintegrated, and each of its parts will eventually belong to the European Union.
That has happened to the former Soviet Union, too. Georgia freed itself from Russia. By the same right and the same logic, Abkhazia can free itself from Georgia.
But then, how can a country avoid disintegration? Very simple: it must convince the smaller peoples which live under its wings that it is worthwhile for them to remain there. If the Scots feel that they enjoy full equality in the United Kingdom, that they have been accorded sufficient autonomy and a fair slice of the common cake, that their culture and traditions are being respected, they may decide to remain there. Such a debate has been going on for decades in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec.
The general trend in the world is to enlarge the functions of the big regional organizations, and at the same time allow peoples to secede from their mother countries and establish their own states. That is what happened in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Serbia and Georgia. That is bound to happen in many other countries.
So even Avnery agrees that a “two state” solution has to be within the framework of one larger “super-state.” The difficult part is finding the balance of authority and division of powers between the culturally autonomous small unit within the larger super-state. This balance must be managed extremely carefully for the system to work. One reason there is such a large degree of political tension in the US today, is precisely because the central Federal government has become overly interventionist. Ironically, this intervention was pushed by so-called “liberals” who wanted the Federal government to push for civil rights for blacks in the South. Now this same Federal government is being used to take away civil rights from all US citizens. The widespread opposition to an EU constitution in Europe is precisely a fear of losing local rights to a powerful and remote central government.
Perhaps the most important point that comes out of this discussion, is that the question itself is based on a false frame. The question is not one state versus two but rather how to divvy up governmental power so that the balance between centralized government and localized autonomy is maintained in a way that satisfies the most people.
Tags: Nationalism, One State Two
